We are selling the family silver. Yes, really — it’s gone. And, as is often the case in our lives, there’s a slightly quirky story behind it.
The phrase “selling the family silver” became popular during the years when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was privatising large parts of Britain’s public services. From memory, British Telecom was one of the first. Perhaps the politics of all that is a debate for another day.
In our case, however, the phrase became unexpectedly literal.
While sorting through even more old belongings, we came across a jar of silver. Inside were odd little blobs of varying sizes, gradually reducing down to fine dust. Rachel’s parents had both worked in a laboratory — in fact, that’s where they met. Back in the 1950s, silver nitrate solution was used in the lab and, when discarded, employees were allowed to take it away. My in-laws extracted the silver, stored it in a jar, and left it in the cellar, where it sat untouched for decades.
Recently, we took it along to one of those “we buy gold and silver” events — the sort where a company hires a village hall and people arrive clutching old watches, jewellery, and heirlooms in the hope of leaving with a bit of cash.
When we presented our mysterious jar of silver, the staff looked slightly baffled. Apparently nobody had ever brought in silver quite like this before.
It was highly entertaining watching one employee point what looked suspiciously like a Star Trek laser device at the contents of the jar. The tests revealed the material wasn’t completely pure silver, and they explained that more detailed analysis would be needed before they could value it properly.
So, taking something of a leap of faith, we handed it over.
Today we heard back. A price was agreed, the negotiation concluded, and the money transferred into our bank account. Wonderful!
So, while the phrase “selling the family silver” might alarm our daughters, they can rest assured we haven’t recklessly sold off some priceless family heirloom for peanuts, never to be seen again.
Unlike, perhaps, many of our public services.
And since I raised the subject earlier, this probably is the moment to admit how much I deplore the way successive Conservative governments sold off so many national services, only for many of them to deteriorate over time. Just think of the Post Office and Royal Mail, along with water, gas, electricity, railways, and even prisons. The list seems endless.
I understand the original argument for privatisation: giving ordinary people the opportunity to buy shares and benefit from growth and investment. In theory, it sounded appealing. In practice, however, things unfolded rather differently. Over time, many ordinary shareholders sold their stakes — perhaps, metaphorically, their own “family silver” — while large institutions steadily bought them up. Ever since, many of those services have seemed increasingly fragile.
And please don’t get me started on the disastrous privatisation of the Probation Service, pushed through by Chris Grayling and supported by our former MP Andrew Selous. Countless people — myself included — warned it was a mistake, but the plans went ahead regardless. Predictably, it failed to deliver on its promises and badly damaged what had once been a decent, if underfunded, public service. Perhaps the one saving grace was that the government eventually brought it back under public control a few years later.
So there we are: a story about decluttering, unexpectedly raising some money, and drifting into a rant about privatisation.
Then again, you never quite know where these blog posts are going to end up, do you?